The Wereldomroep (Dutch World Service) Donates Expat Archives to the Expatriate Archive Centre

The Board of the Expatriate Archive Centre (EAC) in The Hague, the Netherlands, are very pleased with the decision of de Wereldomroep (Dutch World Service) to donate their digital expatriate archives to this young international archive. The donation consists of the web content of WereldKids.nl, rnw.nl and WereldExpat.nl.

The EAC ‘s mission is to collect and preserve the social history of expat life. It started out as part of the Shell group, but has been an independent archive since 2008 with a very broad mission. The EAC adheres to high archival standards and makes the collection accessible to researchers worldwide.

The collection consists of over more than 100 private archives of 10 different nationalities. A very important archive is the Outpost collection. Outpost is the partner support organisation of Shell which supports expatriate partners and families of Shell International. To guarantee the high archival standards, the EAC collaborates with the Hague Municipal Archive for expert advice and storage.

Due to severe budget cuts RNW was forced to part with its archive.  For the expat-archives the EAC seems to be the perfect place as the donated material supplement the present collection very well. The first archive to become available for research will be the Wereld Kids collection, which contains a huge amount of stories by young children about their expat lives. “This children’s archive will be sort of a goldmine for researchers”, says departing director Elske van Holk. It is a very extensive archive, very well kept by the former RNW employee Michiel Haytink.

Martien Sleutjes, former RNW archivist, is preparing the RNW archive for insertion in the EAC collection’s registration system. Rosita Arnts, archivist at the EAC, expects that most of the RNW collection can be found in the online catalogue of the EAC by January 2014.

For more information please contact Peta Chow, PR Officer at the Expatriate Archive Centre by email: pr@xpatarchive.com or telephone: +31 (0)070 427 2014.